Turkish police chief detained over Armenian editor's 2007 murder

ISTANBUL, Jan 19 (Reuters) - A Turkish police chief handed
himself in to authorities on Monday in connection with the
murder of a prominent ethnic Armenian journalist who was gunned
down outside his newspaper offices in Istanbul eight years ago
to the day.

Ercan Demir, who had been assigned last month as police
chief in the Kurdish town of Cizre, surrendered to police in the
capital Ankara after an arrest warrant was issued in the murder
trial of Hrant Dink, editor of the Armenian newspaper Agos,
government officials said.

Demir is the third police officer detained in connection
with the case this month, signalling a possible renewal in
efforts to shed light on what Dink's family has insisted was a
conspiracy that involved state officials.

Dink, 52, was shot in broad daylight in Istanbul on Jan. 19,
2007, unleashing an outpouring of grief among hundreds of
thousands of people angered by his murder as well as
discrimination against non-Sunni and ethnic minorities.

At the time of Dink's death, Demir worked in police
intelligence in the city of Trabzon, where the teenage gunman in
Dink's murder resided. Demir has denied accusations he was
derelict in duty and abused his office, media reports said.

A first trial finished in 2012 with 18 convictions, but
judges ruled there was no organised plot to kill Dink. The
Supreme Court reviewed that verdict, and a court in October said
it would look at whether it was an organised crime.

Dink sought to reconcile Turks and Armenians, 60,000 of whom
still live in Turkey after most of their forebears were killed
or expelled by Ottoman soldiers during World War One.

Before his death, Dink was charged with "insulting
Turkishness" and faced jail terms for reporting that the adopted
daughter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern
Turkish Republic, was an Armenian orphan, among other articles.

"We are all Hrant, we are all Armenian," chanted several
thousand people carrying placards demanding justice, marching on
Monday to the spot where Dink was killed to commemorate the
eighth anniversary of his murder.

This year also marks the centennial of the beginning of the
mass slaughter of Armenians in Turkish lands. The Turkish
government faces pressure to acknowledge the massacres were a
systematic genocide, which it denies.

Armenians say 1.5 million people were killed. Turkey
rejects such a high death toll and says more Turks were killed
in the chaos of the war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
(Additional reporting by Seyhmus Cakan in Diyarbakir and Orhan
Coskun in Ankara; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Angus MacSwan)